existing

Last night I noticed a new version of FreeNAS 9.3 was released. Just two days earlier I built this FreeNAS server, so I wanted everything to be up to date. When I tried to update FreeNAS via the web GUI, it errored out. As I came to find out, this was one of the bugs addressed in the update I was trying to install. It was a catch-22. So, I downloaded the installation disc, burnt it to CD, and booted the FreeNAS server from it. That errored out as well. I had no choice but to blow away the existing installation and do a fresh FreeNAS load. All of my shares and iSCSI targets were stored on a 4 disk RAID-Z array, and FreeNAS itself is installed on an 8GB USB Thumb drive. So, I expected my data to stay in tact.

When I booted the fresh installation for the first time, it automatically imported the zpool stored on the RAID array. I was able to re-create the SMB shares and point them to the /mnt folders those shares pointed to before, everything was going well. Until I got to work trying to bring my iSCSI target volumes back online. In Storage > Volumes, I could see all of the volumes that matched up with my previous ISCSI targets, but I couldn’t import them. I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with them. All of my virtual machines were stored on these volumes so I was desperate to find a solution. I did.

Have you lost your FreeNAS installation? Just recovered from a catastrophe? Recently reinstalled FreeNAS and need to get your iSCSI and other shares back? Going through a FreeNAS recovery? You’ve come to the right place.

How to import an iSCSI target volume from an old FreeNAS installation

First, let’s make sure the volumes that previously correlated to iSCSI targets are visible. Navigate to Storage > View Volumes. Here is what mine looks like.